Riddick!!!!!! WOOT!

NASA Sat data + Google Earth = ... See for yourself

Now, pick your site to see here.

The Stakes: Domestic Violence from the Inside

Critical Thinking about Cheese Sandwiches

"When the headlines rolled, what happened is the marketers came calling."


("Neuroflapdoodle" is my favorite, too, Molly.)

Public Health Emergency declared in Boston

The state has 18 flu-related death so far this season. They are now providing flu vaccination for free. Enlightened of them.

This is Maryland DHMH's flu info page.

This is your momma:


While we're talking vaccination, don't forget Menningitis:


Or Whooping Cough. (This video is heart-breaking. Please get your Td boosters every 10 years. It's not about you, it's about the babies and children you might come into contact with.):


Vaccinations are not just for children. This links to a chart of the CDC's adult vaccination guidelines. (Whooping cough is pertussis, part of the Td/Tdap.)

The Plural of Anecdote is Not Data

(btw, that phrase I titled this with seems to be trending; I'm seeing it a lot lately; it leads the comments in the linked blogpost)

Here's where Leamur gets on her soapbox again and re-posts a whole article so the Imaginary Reader doesn't even have to click through.

To bottom-line it: Having a gun in your home doesn't make you safer. It increases the risk that you will become a victim of gun violence. (And IMO there is just no need for any of my neighbors to own an assault rifle like a Bushmaster "for self-defense." That's just idiotic. There are not elephants roaming the streets of our towns and suburbs.)

I should preface this by noting explicitly that this is not really about the Fox-bashing (well-deserved as it is), although that seems to be the hook writer Chelsea Rudman begins with in this blog post on Media Matters. Here it is:

Fox News has repeatedly hidden the danger of keeping guns in homes behind a handful of anecdotes about home owners who frightened off criminals with their own firearms. Research actually shows that guns kept in homes are far more likely to kill or injure those living there than deter crime.

On Monday's edition of America Live, host Megyn Kelly juxtaposed reports that the White House may push for laws to prevent gun violence with a story about a homeowner near Atlanta who successfully repelled a burglar with her gun. Kelly said that the home invasion "could have ended tragically for a family, but for the fact that the mother had a .38 revolver and knew how to use it."

As correspondent Mike Emanuel gave a report on the White House's interest in gun-violence legislation, text aired on-screen that read: "Mom's Shooting of Intruder Puts New Twist On Gun Control Debate."

[In the blogpost there is an embedded video of the offending news clip, which I have declined to reproduce here, since it does not deserve the attention.] The blog piece continues:

On the December 5 edition of The Five, the co-hosts recited two stories of homeowners who had repelled invading criminals with firearms in the first five minutes of the show. Co-host Andrea Tantaros concluded that "burglars are less apt to break in if they think they might have their brains blown out."

Yet Fox's emphasis on these reports hides the fact that such successful self-defense stories are extremely rare. In a 2011 report summarizing scientific literature about the health risks and benefits of having a gun in the home, David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, found that one study in Atlanta determined victims of break-ins used firearms in self-defense 1.5 percent of the time. Hemenway cited a second study that found guns were used in self-defense by victims of sexual assault in fewer than 0.1 percent of incidents. He concluded that "genuine self-defense gun use is rare" and that "the evidence does not indicate that having a gun reduces the risk of being a victim of a crime or that having a gun reduces the risk of injury during the commission of a crime."

In fact, research has repeatedly found that a gun kept in one's home is far more likely to injure or kill those inside the home. Hemenway wrote that many studies found "that a gun in the home is a risk for homicide in the home" and determined, "The evidence is overwhelming for the fact that a gun in the home is a risk factor for completed suicide and that gun accidents are most likely to occur in homes with guns." The Harvard Injury Control Research Center described a separate study [Click through to this! You won't be sorry!] conducted by Hemenway by saying that "[g]uns in the home are used more often to intimidate intimates than to thwart crime." A 2004 study [This one, too! Actual data included!] published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that "having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home."

The blog-piece ends with this very poorly worded mess from the Brady Campaign website that should actually read, "For each time a gun kills or injures in self-defense, there are corresponding incidents in which a gun has been used..." etc. It's not the same gun, and the 11 attempted or completed suicides, 7 criminal assaults or homicides, and 4 unintentional shooting deaths or injuries per instance of use in self-defense are not happening at the same time or in any way in tandem with the use of the gun in self-defense. I realize the Brady Campaign's website employs flacks rather than journalists, but really, guys? Are you excused from making sense when you're paid to make a point? Aren't you also paid to not embarrass your cause? Chelsea should have left this out. :/

On its website, The Brady Campaign, citing a 1998 study by public health expert Arthur Kellermann, states:

Every time a gun injures or kills in self-defense, it is used:
■11 times for completed and attempted suicides (Kellermann, 1998, p. 263).
■7 times in criminal assaults and homicides, and
■4 times in unintentional shooting deaths or injuries.

Now I'm not against the 2nd Amendment; I think our Constitution is great. I am against Propaganda For Fun And Profit, aka Lying To People In A Big Way Because Our Sponsors Pay Us To. People need to know the facts in order to make informed decisions. That's what this is about. People need to know that guns don't make them safer, that to the contrary, they increase risk. That's why this re-post and rant.

And TMI: While there were all those news stories out about Adam Lanza's poor mom and what a great person she was, all I could think was "What kind of mother keeps any guns in the home where she lives with her mentally impaired/disabled son? And a Bushmaster?! Seriously?!" But me, I was pissed when someone sold my schizophrenic 2nd cousin (who patiently played chess with me when I was a child, even though he was much better than me) the gun he used to blow his brains out in the woods near Sag Harbor because he thought all the people he knew had been replaced by robots. Maybe that makes me biased, I dunno. But that's my anecdote, and according to *actual* data, there are a lot more people out there with anecdotes like mine than like the mom-shot-an-intruder one. But when ours make it to the news, nobody puts it in the context of gun control/availability.

Conscientiously Objecting to "Low Prices"

TMI: following the latest published evidence that WalMart is a corrupt enterprise that sustains itself by corrupting new markets, Leamur has resolved to no longer shop at WalMart.

This Frontline episode is almost 10 years old now. Nothing new here about WalMart, except I'm just done with them.


There is no such thing as a free lunch, remember that one? WalMart's "low prices" cost.

Crack or Whack?

You be the judge. Is this woman on crack, or just whack?


This is the follow-up. I think the lesson here is that enlightenment is relative.


So next Fail (or even Epic Fail), remember Donna the Deer Lady and that it could be worse...

"Margaret Thatcher was my mother."

"It's kind of easy to patronize the past to forgo our responsibilities in the present."

"Every child has a right to a family."

Can you help?

FRONTLINE: Big Sky, Big Money

In case you missed it this week. Not to be missed:

Watch Big Sky, Big Money on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

From Data to Mind Control

When you get past the accent ("an electronic faahk-book", lol), the CIO of Proctor & Gamble has some intriguing things to say about the data and analytics needs & wants of a company with greater than 70% market penetration of the world.

Digitize. Visualize. Simulate. In real time.


(Thanks to Fritz Nelson of Information Week for pointing this out.)

Greg (Wall Street's Conscientious Objector) Smith: The Book

Book review in WSJ. (Apparently the book is more of a memoir than an expose.)

60 Minutes interview:


The resignation-by-op-ed.

Greed-is-Ugly Week continues with Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

PBS Author Interview: Sheila Bair (Bull by the Horns)

She probably wasn't allowed to title it "Bullshit by the Horns". ;)

Watch Former Regulator Bair Recounts Stories of Financial Crisis on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Finding optimism about the future with Google's Eric Schmidt & Peter Diamandis

"Technology changes the conversation."



X-Prizes!:

How did you spend your summer vacation?

I also want to draw attention to this interesting post by an epidemiologist who blogged from the refugee camps in South Sudan, Ruby Siddiqui. Full text is linked here for those of us too apathetic to click the link.

Emergency epidemiology-what does this mean?
By Médecins Sans Frontières
Posted: August 21, 2012

‘Mortality rates in a refugee camp in South Sudan are nearly double the threshold for an emergency, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has warned’ said a BBC report on 6th July 2012. ‘In Yida camp, [MSF data show] at least five children dying each day, most from diarrhoea and severe infections’, August 2nd, MSF press release. But where did these numbers come from? Getting good data might not seem the first priority in an emergency but it is essential to understand and respond appropriately to the needs of the population affected. I am an MSF epidemiologist and have just returned from the Jamam refugee crisis in South Sudan (I have documented my experiences here). In early May 2012 we started receiving reports of refugees fleeing Blue Nile state, Sudan and crossing the border into the world’s youngest nation, South Sudan. The refugees were escaping fighting and bombing by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) targeting rebels allied with the South Sudanese (Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)-North). These refugees, weakened by months on the run, hiding in forests and caves and eating nothing but leaves were arriving in Upper Nile State, South Sudan, in shocking conditions, sometimes beyond medical care. And then in June 2012 the rains came, turning Jamam refugee camp into a muddy swamp.

MSF was already working in two refugee camps in Upper Nile State (Jamam and Doro) and another in neighbouring Unity State (Yida), supporting a total of 120,000 refugees since January 2012 that had fled the same fighting. Agencies were already struggling to provide enough clean water and shelter to these refugees. This was certainly a challenging environment. I have never seen children so malnourished that they are literally skin and bone or people drinking from muddy pools. My role was to understand the scale and severity of the emergency. This is measured through the mortality rate. I needed to somehow measure what proportion of the camp population was dying every day. These data would guide the nature and size of our intervention. And ensure we gave these refugees the most appropriate help.

The MSF epidemiology team interview families at a transit camp near Jamam, South Sudan after the start of the rainy season. Image Credit: Ruby Siddiqui/MSF There are several approaches for measuring mortality such as the classic 30×30 retrospective cluster sampling survey where 30 clusters (villages, wards, districts) are randomly selected and 30 households within each cluster are interviewed. Although this technique is useful for capturing the mortality rate at a single point in time, it does not indicate whether the rate is increasing or decreasing and may not be relevant to the current situation if the recall period is large.

So we elected to set up prospective surveillance in which we visited every household within the camp weekly. As well as monitoring mortality rates, with this system we could monitor the health status of the refugees more closely. We could refer any sick people to the MSF clinic, monitor the nutritional status of children aged less than five years using mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) measurements and trace children defaulting from the therapeutic feeding programmes before their condition deteriorated.

Such a system relies on solid training of outreach workers, local people that are trusted by the local population and able to communicate in their language. We identified 46 such people, all from the local population, most of whom were not literate but could all count. Although it was at times challenging to train these outreach workers, sometimes requiring two rounds of translation (English-Arabic and Arabic-Ingassana or Magaja) and re-designing of surveillance forms such that they required no writing, these teams were bright and understood quickly what they needed to do. And by forming them into teams in which there was a mix of men and women, all local languages were represented and at least one person was literate we were able to discover quickly that the crude mortality rate was 1.8 per 10,000 per day and the under-five mortality rate was 2.8 per 10,000 per day. Both rates were well above the emergency threshold, defining this as a severe situation. Almost 3 children were dying in the camp every day and 65% of deaths were due to diarrhoea. We were able to respond to these shocking findings by decentralising clinic services, setting up oral rehydration points throughout the camp and promoting safe water and hygiene practices at every household visited. The international media quoted our findings in headline news that demanded that governments and international agencies paid attention to this refugee crisis.

And now we have seen mortality rates dip below the emergency thresholds. There is still much to do. We need to identify and protect against the main morbidities in this population, remain vigilant against malaria and cholera for which the conditions are perfect and moreover continue to advocate for the transfer of these refugees out of the Jamam swamp. And as long as we continue to supervise strongly and are provided with a vehicle when needed (always a major challenge in MSF projects!), the prospective surveillance system will continue to provide the real-time health data that enables us to respond quickly and provide timely care to this population who have been through so much.

Ruby Siddiqui
Ruby Siddiqui is an epidemiologist based in the Manson Unit, MSF’s clinical research unit in London, United Kingdom. She has just returned from working on the refugee crisis in South Sudan. She supports MSF field projects with medical surveillance and monitoring, outbreak investigation and evidence-based decision-making (including routine data analysis, surveys and operational research).

The Incredible Shrinking World

We are caged in bubbles...



"...you couldn't get a functioning democracy, if citizens didn't have a good flow of information..."

Explains a lot, doesn't it?

PBS/NOVA on Concussions

Please try to ignore poor Neil being his goofy-cute but not always charismatic TV-persona:

Watch Phoenix Mars Lander, Brain Trauma, Mammoth Mystery, Judah... on PBS. See more from NOVA scienceNOW.

Mommas, don't let your babies grow up to play football...

PBS/NOVA Katrina Program

Watch Storm That Drowned a City on PBS. See more from NOVA.